The grocery store is an apt metaphor when it comes to the rotation of stuff within your home (do note that it’s much less about the amount of stuff that a grocery store possesses than the way in which they’re managed). New stock is always placed not at the front of aisles, nor the tops of produce piles, but at the backs and bottoms.

If grocers replenished goods from the top down, the result would be less than pretty/a health code violation, as the items situated behind and under would continue to loiter there for weeks, or, who knows, maybe for ever. Obviously, the grocers are smarter than that– they employ the counterintuitive-intuitive method of placing all the freshest items in the furthest to reach positions. This ensures a healthy rotation of groceries, helping to reduce the amount of food that’s wasted.

And bam, that’s the tip. Do that in your home.

Would now be a bad time for me to admit that I’m absolutely a brat at the grocery store, and that I constantly cheat the whole system by knowingly reaching straight to the strawberries and cherry tomato cartons at the furthest back? Hmmm…bye!